Month: January 2009

Tomorrow is Super Bowl XLIII (43) and we will give our yearly prediction. Based on past years if this is the team you have in office pool or leading at the end of your squares you are probably going to lose. We have learned a long time ago that gambling was not something we were very lucky doing. We can remember a time at a junket in Las Vegas after a horrible time at the Black Jack table and older gentlemen said “The odds are against you, see these big building we are in, how do you think they built them?” That sage advice has stayed with me ever since. We would love to tell we know something or have some brilliant insight. Things like the speed of Larry Fitzgerald is going to make the Steelers secondary be exposed for other receivers. The running game of the Steelers will beat down the Cardinals and by the fourth quarter they will be unable to stop them. The Special teams of the Steelers will keep the field position in their favor making shorter drives for more points. Lastly the high powered Cardinals offense will jump out to a 14 point lead (like against the Panthers), which will make the Steelers, try to play catch up all day. So for our prediction will throw our support behind the Pittsburgh Steelers as they are the tougher team and that usually fairs well against a finesse team.

We all know there is no media bias. You must remember the clip of President George Bush leaving a press conference stage left, but the door was locked. We saw that clip everywhere from the news to night time talk shows. David Letterman must have played it a thousand times. We yesterday we heard there was a picture of President Barack Obama trying to walk through a window he a assumed was a door. The problem is this image there is no video is no where to be found. We are thankful for the Internet as we were able to find the photo. We also believe someone has to have the video. We knew that the jokes about this new President were going to be hard to find, we did not expect when he did do something funny it would not be part of the news cycle. We had become a custom to people making fun of our president on a daily basis. It is not a shock but it is a telling fact on where the media and Hollywood interests lie. We know it is just a photo but I bet this is the first you are hearing about it and it happened on Tuesday.

The Super Bowl ads have taken a bit of the stage over the actual game these last couple of days. We reported yesterday that the ads were not selling like last year. Today we find PETA had an extremely racy and provocative ad campaign for the game called Studies Show Vegetarians Have Better Sex. The 30 second spot featuring lingerie-clad models getting intimate with vegetables. The NBC Advertising Standards department flagged the ad asking the following to be removed or they would not show the ad, licking pumpkin, touching her breast with her hand while eating broccoli, pumpkin from behind between legs, rubbing pelvic region with pumpkin, asparagus on lap, licking eggplant, and rubbing asparagus on breast. Well as you can imagine PETA dropped it on YouTube and it already has 35,000 views. We are not a member of PETA and a carnivore who loves meat, the only PETA we belong to is People Eat Tasty Animals, but for the record this is a pretty good commercial. Shame on NBC, for depriving millions of people watching the game the chance for PETA to get out their message.

Super Bowl XLIII (43) between the Arizona Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Steelers is Sunday February 1 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay, Florida. The game will be broadcast on NBC it is their first Super Bowl telecast in 11 years. The economy is hitting everywhere as they have two spots they have not sold as this evening. The spots started for sale at $3 million and dropped to $2.8 million as the time went by. Last year FOX had the game and sold out of ad space months before the game that was at a rate of around $2.75 million. Let us not cry for NBC as they still expect to make more than $200 million in ad revenue. You will see as usual clients as Anheuser-Busch InBev Pepsi & Coca-Cola commercials will air the most with a total of 4.5 minutes of time each. So if you have a company and want millions of people to know about you might be able to buy a minute spot on Sunday for a sale price of around $2.5 million. Since we are talking about the Super Bowl we are hoping for a Arizona Cardinal victory. Check back later in the week and we will reveal why we are routing for the team from the valley of the Sun.

The good new for newspaper web sites is they are getting more visitors; better news is those visitors are coming back more often. Just like every other website fighting for your attention the visitors are not spending much time at the site. They are averaging about a half-hour for a unique visitor. The other problem is they still have not found a way to turn these visits into revenue. According to Nielsen, 40 million people visited newspaper sites in December, which is a 16 percent increase over the previous year. The returning numbers we also getting better as return visitors were up to 6.3 times compared to 5.8 times a year earlier. This umber is better but they are small in both readers and increases seen by Yahoo, MSNBC, CNN and AOL. The newspaper are providing a service in two ways the reader that missed an edition for whatever reason is able to catch up from anywhere in the world. The other is they are picking up readers as regular readers send links to articles around the net. The newspaper has to do a better job of finding a way to make the users visits translate into dollars. These numbers are encouraging as people should understand the AP story from Yahoo is not the only angle of a story. The newspapers may need to start partnerships to survive. They need out of the box thinking to find a way to sell there product through the offer of someone else and until the find that delicate balance they will continue to struggle.

So when we woke up this morning and the world is about to end. According to a simulation of planetary warming trends, failure to drastically cut greenhouse gas pollution within the next half century could choke Earth’s oceans for the next 100,000 years. Can you believe it the next 100,000 years? Here is the plan to save the earth as we just move relatively rapidly towards a carbon-neutral global economy, with greenhouse emissions peaking by 2050. This would result in circa-2100 temperatures about 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than now. Though terrestrially dramatic, such a rise would produce long-term ocean warming peaking in several thousand years at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Such a rise would fall well within the range of ocean adaptation. Anytime these global warming tree hugging people get up on the soapbox, they sound so doom and gloom about things that are hundreds if not thousands of years away. The problem we have with any of this is if you cannot tell me when it going to rain or snow. If you tell me it will snow and the accumulation will be five inches and we only get one or this in reverse. How many times have you been told it was going to be a beautiful day and have been caught in the rain? The problem how can you say what is going to happen this far into the future when you can not even predict with any accuracy what is going to happen in the next 24 hours. We understand when we make this argument tree huggers say the climate for weather is always changing. This excuse by its very nature is the reason these doom and gloom philosophy are just to improbable to believe.

Every month you hear about Consumer Confidence Spending index, recently this has been dropping. You start to wonder what that means in relation to me. Living for the last 25 years nothing much changes. Friday night everyone goes out spends money. It did not matter if the people could afford it they would use credit cards or rob Peter to pay Paul, the execution really did not matter. The Consumer Confidence Spending was happening because if people had money or not they felt they could get more, extend credit, work bonus or overtime, even up coming paychecks. When people feel these things are at risk, getting more credit, losing their job, no overtime they shut down extra spending. This is what a drop in Consumer Confidence Spending index is, this was reflected in true color on Friday Night when we went to Wal-Mart. We were able to get a spot 10 cars from the door. We were able to walk the aisles without maneuvering around people, and when it was time to checkout we walked up to a checkout without anyone in line. You could feel the vacuum that has become the economy sucking the life right out of the store. On Sunday we took the little ones to a birthday party and while we waited there was another Wal-Mart in this different town. We had to go inside to see if the results were the same. This was a Sunday afternoon and no Football for the first time in three months so the store was crowded. The lines were moving fast and there were no carriages that were filled over the top with items as usual. We are sure we now know what they mean by Consumer Confidence Spending index and we witnessed it is down, noticeably down.

Tom Hanks apologizes for calling Mormon supporters of proposition 8 un-American. Hanks claim he is sorry for telling FOXNews that Mormons who supported California’s constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage unamerican. The actor released a statement through his publicist. He admitting to being sorry for saying they were un-American because he believes Proposition 8 is counter to the promise of our Constitution; he claims that it is codified discrimination. This is another liberal Hollywood person that just does not get it. To say members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who contributed to Proposition 8 where anything more then voicing there own vote is obnoxious. This is the same problem with the liberal media as they never try to understand another view but their own. The bigger irony in the statement is Hanks Playtone Production Company is the spearhead behind Big Love a show that focuses on Polygamy and the Mormon religion in Utah.

This week we highlight as the Women of the Week, Minka Kelly. Last year she was number 23 on the list of tea512 smokin sasses of 2008. Minka was born on June 24, 1980 in Los Angeles, California. She grew up in New Mexico and that is where she spent her childhood until she graduated from high school. She went to live with her father in LA to become a surgical technician. Her father was absent a lot of her younger years as he is a guitarist born in France and played three years with Aerosmith. While attending school in LA she was bitten with the acting bug. She started taking small roles on the big and small screen. She started with roles in the movie 2 Fast 2 Furious in 2003 and in 2004 on the Drake and Josh Show. She had a three episode recurring role on What I Like About you in 2005. Minka Kelly was recently seen at the Golden Globe Awards InStyle/Warner Bros After Party pictured above. She has exploded on to the scene and our list from her role in Friday Night Lights. We thought she would drop this year as her character had turned to religion but 2009 started of in a completely different direction. She has a smoking athletic body and looks hot in anything she wears on the screen or the red carpet. She looks awesome in the blue panther cheerleading outfit and totally rocks the denim mini skirt. Minka Kelly is a shoe in to make the list again in 2009.
Countdown to 51st Grammy Awards: 13 days
Countdown to Baseball Pitchers & Catchers 19 days
Countdown to 78th Oscar Awards: 27 days

It Seems Like Forever, And A Day,
If My Intentions, Were Misunderstood,
Please Be Kind, I’ve Done, All I Should…
W. Axl Rose Prostitute (2008)

So four of the last five Presidents have been left handed and President Regan was left handed but Catholic School made him change to the right hand. President Obama is the ninth left-handed president. Some other great people that are left handed. There are 90% of the people are right handed so 10% are left handed and more superior. The International day for left handers is August 13 so mark your calendar. Here are some other great left-handed people through time Benjamin Franklin Joan of Arc , Ramses II, Alexander the Great Julius Caesar, Napoléon Bonaparte, King Louis XVI, Queen Victoria ,King George II, Henry Ford, David Rockefeller and Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Authors that are southpaws are Mark Twain and H.G. Wells. There are Musicians like Joe Perry and Robert Plant. The film industry has Robert DeNiro, Cary Grant, Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Pryor and the one from the Matrix Keanu Reeves. Now that you have seen all this unbelievable talent that comes from only 10% of the world population is there any doubt left handed people are the far superior to their right handed counterparts. There is one left handed person we did not mention but in full disclosure the writer of this post is also left handed.

So if she’s somewhere near me I hope to God she hears me
There’s no one else could ever make me feel
I’m so alive I hoped she’d never leave me
Please God you must believe me
I’ve searched the universe and found myself Within’ her eyes
W. Axl Rose This is Love (2008)